After the Revolution (Exodus 19:3-7; 20:1-17; Pentecost 17a; October 5, 2014)

After the Revolution

Exodus 19:3-7; 20:1-17
Pentecost 17a
October 5, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Has there ever been a time in the world when all was going well?  This time certainly isn’t it.  We haven’t quite finished one war when we seem to be sliding back into one we had thought was over.  Unemployment is down a little, but families are making less than they did ten years ago.  We have a Congress that cannot agree on the time of day or the color of the sky and we are subjected to endless political advertisements. 

In the midst of these things our lives go on.  One family struggles to come to terms with the death of a wife, mother and grandmother.  Another celebrates the birth of a granddaughter.  One couple basks in a newlywed glow and another watches, almost as spectators, as their marriage lurches toward dissolution.  One set of parents celebrates a teenager's accomplishments and another is afraid that their child is doing drugs—again.

These are just a few of the events that vary in scope from the unbearably personal to the global.  And what do we do as the church?  We gather to worship.  To some folks this looks like a form of escapism—for an hour we can deny that any of these things are happening.  But Bishop William Willamon turns this around: “...the function of Sunday worship [is] to withdraw to the real world where we are given eyes to see and ears to hear the advent of a Kingdom that the world has taught us to regard as only fantasy.”[1]  As we sing our hymns, as we gather around the table for our holy meal, the scales fall from our eyes and the wax in our ears loosens and we see and hear just a little better.  We listen carefully to the Bible, for it is here that the proclamation is clearest and most explicit.

That is the word that God speaks to us, the word that we speak into our world: the world of politics and campaigning, of endless wars and financial struggle, of life and death.  We look for good news and what do we get instead?—rules. Sure, they're good rules, rules that have stood the test of time, but they're rules just the same.  It would be okay, maybe, if we were sure that we were keeping the rules, but we're not so sure.

We wonder, for example, whether we haven't really put some other gods before God or fashioned some sort of idols to worship as being more comfortable than the living God—the Market, maybe, or Security, or Comfort.  In a world that moves 24/7 we're pretty sure that Sabbath keeping has gotten short shrift.  The next few perhaps don't cause most of us so much anxiety, unless we remember that Jesus sharpened them considerably.  If calling someone a fool is tantamount to murder, if looking with active desire at someone whom we have no right to desire is tantamount to adultery, then very few of us can claim to be innocent.  If wanting what belongs to our neighbor is outlawed, then we who live in an economy that runs on envy are probably outlaws.

The Bible can tell it to us straight, but it isn't really very good news to discover just how far short of God's standards we fall.  We already knew that, anyway.  Why rub it in?

But maybe that isn't what's going on here.  There's more than a list of rules in this list of rules.  It's right in the beginning in what we could call the prologue, but we probably missed hearing it.  Protestants tend to be legalists, which is odd considering our legacy in the Reformation, but it's true nonetheless.  We mostly hear the rules and we either hope to measure up to God's love for us by keeping them or we use them to demonstrate how much better we're doing than whoever is “other” at the moment, you know, those people.

Yahweh is quite clear about the context for these rules.  Yahweh is clear about the relationship in which these rules are framed.  These are the words that the text tells us Moses said Yahweh had spoken: “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”  These are God's credentials, if you will.  This is what gives God the authority to make rules.  But it's even more than that.

God refers to Israel's past in Egypt.  It was a past of slavery.  The book of Exodus tells what that was like.  Israel labored to build the warehouse cities of Pithom and Rameses.  They made their own bricks from the mud along the banks of the Nile, mixing the mud with straw and letting the bricks dry in the Egyptian sun.  Pharaoh needed the warehouse cities because he was running an empire.  He sent out his armies to the south and to the northeast and they came back with plunder.  That's how empires work: they send their armies to the margins so that goods will flow to the center.  You would think that once Pharaoh had all that he could use that would be enough and the armies could come home to stay.  But that's not how empires work.  In an empire there is no such thing as “enough.”  There is only “more.”

When Pharaoh wants more, his slaves get production quotas so that supply of warehouses can keep up with the supply of plunder.  Pharaoh serves gods who know nothing about peace or rest or plenty—they are gods of war and work and worry.  When Pharaoh is anxious, all Egypt is anxious and his slaves most of all.  That was the context in which Israel cried out to Yahweh.  That was the misery that Yahweh observed.  This was the cry that Yahweh heard.  These were the sufferings that Yahweh knew.  And so Yahweh “came down,” Exodus tells us, to deliver Israel.  Yahweh sent Moses to set Israel free.  Moses confronted Pharaoh with the demands of a God Pharaoh did not know, did not serve, and did not understand.  Pharaoh was to suspend his production schedule and allow Israel time off to worship this strange God.

Pharaoh's response was to downsize.  There would be the same production schedule, the same quotas, but the Division of Straw Supply would be eliminated and Israel would have to find its own straw.  No rest, no relaxation of the production schedule, no room for worship of Moses' strange God.

So Yahweh set them free from Pharaoh and the brick quotas.  But understand something.  We hear the word freedom and we automatically think of the freedom of individuals to do whatever they want.  When someone tells us we're free, we think we're free to go where we want and do what we please.  We think it means that we're no longer accountable to anyone except ourselves.  We think it means that we have rights.  The vocabulary and the structure of this kind of thinking come from the Enlightenment that put the individual at the center of the universe beholden to no god.  In this thinking we can choose to follow the gods of Egypt, the God of Israel or no god at all.

But that's not the way it works, says Yahweh to Israel.  There are only two alternatives. The first is Pharaoh's Egypt.  If Israel chooses that alternative, it will serve the gods of Pharaoh's empire, the gods of war, work and worry.  It will live according to production schedules and quotas.

Or it can serve Yahweh, who is a God of peace, rest and plenty.  In place of the slavery that serves the ambitions of those at the top of the social order, there is genuine community.  In place of a violent struggle for survival—whether the violence is directed at others or at themselves—there is covenant.

In nearly the shortest form possible, we can see the shape of the covenant in these ten conditions for an alternative to slavery Pharaoh's Egypt and service to his gods of war, work and worry.  This is the alternative for which Yahweh brought Israel “out of the land of Egypt, out of house of slavery.”

Each of these ten conditions warrants an extended look, but there isn't time in one sermon.  So, instead of a detailed look at each, let's look at the shape of the whole.  The covenant has two dimensions, one vertical and one horizontal.  The first, vertical dimension is embodied in the first three commandments: Israel is to have no gods before Yahweh, Israel is to refrain from the practice of making its own gods, Israel is not to use Yahweh's name in vain.  Put differently, Israel has no authority to exchange Yahweh for some other gods.  As soon as it does, it ceases to be Israel.  Yahweh cannot be captured in an image or in anything that Israel fashions with its own hands.  Lastly, Yahweh will not be manipulated by Israel's use of the Name. The covenant is a relationship, not a technology for keeping Israel comfortable.

The last six conditions describe the horizontal dimension, the relations within the covenant community.  The members of the covenant community of Israel are to value life, and neither take it from another, nor treat with disrespect the people who gave life to them; they are to value the commitments that they have made and that others have made, and not regard them as something to be kept when convenient and ignored when not; they are to respect the need for people to have reliable access to their possessions, not to take them away; they are to speak the truth; they are to be content with what they have, not consumed with anxiety to have more.

The most marvelous condition, though, the one that makes this covenant so wonderful, so liberating, so different from the inhuman conditions of Pharaoh's Egypt, is the fourth condition, the one at the hinge, the commandment to rest.  Here's the commandment: “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.”

The two dimensions are both present here: it really is the hinge.  Why does Israel rest?  It rests because it doesn't serve gods of production.  It serves a God who rests, a God who trusts the creation, a God who has need for recovery and restoration and relief from work.  My colleagues know that I am not impressed by bragging about how long it's been since they took a day off.  I have been known to say something like, “Even God rests one day out of seven; just who do you think you are?  If God trusts the universe to take care of itself for a day, why do you imagine that you can't?”  The fact is that clergy violation of the covenant is most egregious in precisely this place.  We do it, of course, because the church is not sure whether it serves the gods of production (which we typically call things like “innovation” or “program development” or “constant availability”).  I have heard churches express pride in how hard their pastor works and in how long it's been since she took a day off.  I have never heard a congregation that was proud that its pastor honored the Sabbath.

This condition has as a horizontal dimension, too.  Even Pharaoh's Egypt had some rest.  For Pharaoh, at least.  The production schedules could be met and Pharaoh could take a day off.  Sabbath for Pharaoh, but not for his slaves.  Not so in Israel.  In Israel, the production schedules are interrupted one day a week.  One day a week no one has a quota to fill, not parents, not children, not slaves, not livestock, not even the migrant worker. No one.  God rests.  Israel rests.  Everyone in Israel rests.  Period.  The production schedules, the quotas are set aside, not for sake of coming back to work able to work harder, not for the sake of overall efficiency.  But simply because Yahweh is a God of peace and rest and confidence, rather than war and work and worry.

That's Israel's choice. It will face this choice many times.  Just before entering the land of promise, after a generation of desert wandering, Moses will set this choice before Israel once again.  In place of Pharaoh, the alternative will be Canaanite, but the choice is still between the gods of war, work and worry on the one hand and Yahweh, the God of peace, rest and confidence on the other.  Judah will face this choice in exile: the gods of Babylon or Yahweh.  Jesus will lay the same choice before his hearers: the gods of Rome and its empire or the God who clothes the lilies in glories that Solomon never knew.

And we face the same choice today.  The crazy world out there offers us the gods of war and work and worry and tells us that serving them is the only way to stay alive, the only way to have a life.  But it's Pharaoh all over again.  Yahweh, the friend of Moses, the God of Israel, the Father of Jesus, offers us a differently alternative: a covenant community and a life of peace, rest and confidence.  This is the God who sets a table in our midst and promises that each one of us will get everything we need, that none of us will be burdened with more than we need, that no one will be turned away.  This, I submit, is a truer picture of the world that God is bringing into being than any picture you will see on the evening news or read in the articles of The Wall Street Journal.  The gods of war, work and worry tell us only lies.  The truth, reality, is what you see before you and it is the good news that is announced in your hearing this day.  This is the word of God for the people of God.

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[1]William H. Willimon, What's Right with the Church (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 121, cited in Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching, 2^nd edition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 7, emphasis added.